Archaeologists Unearth Colossal Pair of Sphinxes in Egypt During Restoration of Landmark Temple

A pair of giant limestone sphinxes have been unearthed by archaeologists excavating the temple of Amenhotep III, who ruled ancient Egypt about 3,300 years ago and was the grandfather of Tutankhamun.

The statues depict the pharaoh wearing a mongoose-shaped headdress, a royal beard and a wide necklace. After further analysis, the team found the script ‘the beloved of Amun-Re’ across one of the sphinx’s chests.

The Egyptian-German archaeological team, led by Horig Sorosian, found the colossal statues submerged in water at the funerary building, known as the ‘Temple of Millions of Years,’ according to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The temple is in Luxor, Egypt, which is famously known for the oldest and most ancient Egyptian sites, along with being home to the Valley of Kings.

Along with the 26-foot-long sphinxes, the team also uncovered three nearly intact statues of the goddess Sekhmet, the lion-like defender of the Sun god Ra and the remains of a great pillared hall.

And the walls throughout the hall are decorated with ceremonial and ritual scenes. Horosian emphasized the importance of this discovery, as the two sphinxes confirm the presence of the beginning of the procession road where the celebrations of the Beautiful Valley Festival were held every year.

This yearly event was a time when people could visit their deceased loved ones and bring them gifts – and it was only celebrated in the ancient city of Thebes.

King Amenhotep III was the grandfather of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun and ruled in the 14th century BC at the height of Egypt’s the New Kingdom and presided over a vast empire stretching from Nubia in the south to Syria in the north.  

The 18th dynasty ruler became king aged around 12, with his mother as regent and is believed to have ruled Egypt between 1386 and 1349 BC. Amenhotep III chose the daughter of a provincial official as his royal wife, and throughout his reign, Queen Tiy featured alongside the king. 

Amenhotep III died in around 1354 BC and was succeeded by his son Amenhotep IV, widely known as Akhenaten, who was King Tut’s father.

Tut began his reign at the age of eight or nine and ruled for about nine years. However, the young king was plagued with health issues due to his parents being brother and sister – and experts believe the issues led to his death.

Amenhotep III may have left the Earth thousands of years ago, but archaeologists are still uncovering remnants of his past, with the most lavish being the ‘lost golden city.’ 

In April 2021, archaeologists announced the discovery of a 3,500-year-old city in Luxor, which they said is the largest ancient city ever to be discovered in Egypt.

It was built by Amenhotep III and later used by King Tutankhamun. Luxor, a city of some 500,000 people on the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt, is an open-air museum of intricate temples and pharaonic tombs. 

Excavations at the site uncovered bakeries, workshops and burials of animals and humans, along with jewellery, pots and mud bricks bearing seals of Amenhotep III.

The team initially set out to discover Tutankhamun’s Mortuary Temple, where the young king was mummified and received status rites, but they stumbled upon something far greater.

Betsy Brian, Professor of Egyptology at John Hopkins University in Baltimore USA, said ‘The discovery of this lost city is the second most important archaeological discovery since the tomb of Tutankhamun’.

‘The discovery of the Lost City, not only will give us a rare glimpse into the life of the Ancient Egyptians at the time when the Empire was at its wealthiest but will help us shed light on one of history’s greatest mysteries: why did Akhenaten & Nefertiti decide to move to Amarna.’

The city sits between Rameses III’s temple at Medinet Habu and Amenhotep III’s temple at Memnon. Excavations began in September 2020 and within weeks, archaeologists uncovered formations made of mud bricks.

After more digging, archaeologists unearthed the site of the large, well-preserved city with almost complete walls, and rooms filled with tools once used by the city’s inhabitants. 

Has the Burial Chamber of Ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti Been Found?

Egyptian archaeologists announced recently they may have found the burial place of Queen Nefertiti in a hidden chamber close to the pharaoh’s burial complex in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.

The final resting place of Nefertiti, who served as queen alongside Pharaoh Akhenaten over 3,000 years ago, is one of Egypt’s greatest mysteries.

It is believed that the powerful monarch was the mother of King Tutankhamun’s wife and that she briefly ruled Egypt outright after the death of her husband in 1335 BC.

Archaeologists have never found her remains, and one long-standing theory is that she was buried in a secret compartment within Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Tutankhamun died at just 19 years of age, and his burial complex is exceptionally small for a monarch, leading some experts to speculate that parts of it still remain undiscovered.

Now scientists have used high-tech radar scans to reveal possible evidence of hidden chambers beyond the tomb’s north wall.

The corridor-like space measures two meters (six feet) high and over 10 meters (32 feet) long. It sits just a few meters from Tutankhamun’s gold-laden treasury.

The study was led by archaeologist Mamdouh Eldamaty, a former Egyptian minister of antiquities.

A new technology called ground-penetrating radar, which uses radar pulses to see through soil and rock, was used to scan around Tutankhamun’s tomb.

There is no concrete proof yet that what they found really is a hidden chamber – let alone that it contains Nefertiti’s tomb – but it offers an extremely tantalizing prospect to Egyptologists.

Ancient Egyptian mummy of a young girl is first with a bandaged wound

Before you go, “Aren’t all mummies wrapped in bandages, hardy, har, har,” hilarious, but let us explain. Scientists have found the oldest-known example of a bandaged wound on the mummy of a child who once lived in Ancient Egypt.

Business Insider reports how researchers from Germany, Italy, and the States were able to essentially digitally unwrap the mummy—a four-year-old girl who passed away about 2,000 years ago—using computed tomography (CT) scans in order to properly examine the remains.

It was only then in the resulting images that they were able to observe how a “bandage-like structure” was wrapped around the child’s lower right leg, remnants of pus implying that some type of skin lesion may have occurred.

“In ancient Egypt, infections were likely a common aspect of daily life and the major cause of death,” reads the study, as published to Science Direct.

“However, the overall evidence of infections in ancient mummies is limited, especially in the less frequently investigated child mummies.”

This particular mummy was one of 21 children mummies that were observed in all, others, too, which showed signs of skin lesions and infections.

Only the girl, though, had a bandage still attached to where it was placed over her injury.

Furthermore, while the study explains that such Ancient Egyptian medical treatments have been recorded by previous texts, the child mummy is a rare, physical example.

The same Business Insider article does note, however, that the scientists do posit the possibility that the bandage is for religious purposes, not medicinal.

4,000-Year-Old Mummies Are Half Brothers, DNA Analysis Shows

Using ‘next generation’ DNA sequencing scientists have found that the famous ‘Two Brothers’ mummies of the Manchester Museum have different fathers so are, in fact, half-brothers.

The Two Brothers are the Museum’s oldest mummies and amongst the best-known human remains in its Egyptology collection. They are the mummies of two elite men — Khnum-nakht and Nakht-ankh — dating to around 1800 BC.

However, ever since their discovery in 1907 there has been some debate amongst Egyptologists whether the two were actually related at all. So, in 2015, ‘ancient DNA’ was extracted from their teeth to solve the mystery.

But how did the mystery start? The pair’s joint burial site, later dubbed The Tomb of The Two Brothers, was discovered at Deir Rifeh, a village 250 miles south of Cairo.

They were found by Egyptian workmen directed by early 20th century Egyptologists, Flinders Petrie and Ernest Mackay.

Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the coffins indicated that both men were the sons of an unnamed local governor and had mothers with the same name, Khnum-aa. It was then the men became known as the Two Brothers.

When the complete contents of the tomb were shipped to Manchester in 1908 and the mummies of both men were unwrapped by the UK’s first professional female Egyptologist, Dr Margaret Murray. Her team concluded that the skeletal morphologies were quite different, suggesting an absence of family relationships.

Based on contemporary inscriptional evidence, it was proposed that one of the Brothers was adopted.

Therefore, in 2015, the DNA was extracted from the teeth and, following hybridization capture of the mitochondrial and Y chromosome fractions, sequenced by a next-generation method.

Analysis showed that both Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht belonged to mitochondrial haplotype M1a1, suggesting a maternal relationship.

The Y chromosome sequences were less complete but showed variations between the two mummies, indicating that Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht had different fathers, and were thus very likely to have been half-brothers.

Dr Konstantina Drosou, of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester who conducted the DNA sequencing, said: “It was a long and exhausting journey to the results but we are finally here.

I am very grateful we were able to add a small but very important piece to the big history puzzle and I am sure the brothers would be very proud of us. These moments are what make us believe in ancient DNA. “

The study, which is being published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, is the first to successfully use the typing of both mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA in Egyptian mummies.

Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, said: “The University of Manchester, and Manchester Museum, in particular, has a long history of research on ancient Egyptian human remains.

Our reconstructions will always be speculative to some extent but to be able to link these two men in this way is an exciting first.”

A child mummy from Egypt is the first found with a dressed wound, offering a rare glimpse into ancient medicine

Scientists found the first recorded example of a bandaged wound on a mummified body, which could offer more insight into ancient medical practices. The finding was published in the International Journal of Paleopathology, a peer-reviewed journal, on December 30.

The researchers said they discovered the bandages on the remains of a young girl, aged no more than four years, who died about 2,000 years ago. The dressing wrapped a wound that showed signs of infection, the study said.

“It gives us clues about how they [ancient Egyptians] treated such infections or abscesses during their lifetime,” Albert Zink, head of the Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzona, Italy, and an author on the study, told Insider.

The mummy was thought to be taken from the “Tomb of Aline” in the Faiyum Oasis, located southwest of Cairo, the study said. The finding had come as a surprise to the scientists, who didn’t set out looking for the bandages.

“It was really exciting because we didn’t expect it,” Zink said. “It was never described before.”

A rare glimpse into medical history

Ancient Egyptians are thought to have had an adept understanding of medical practices.

They wouldn’t have known things we would now take for granted, like how a heart functions, how microbes cause infection, or how rogue cells cause cancer — but they did have a fairly good idea of how to treat symptoms of disease, Zink said.

“We know from other evidence, like papyrus, that they had a good experience of treating wounds and injuries,” said Zink.

So it’s surprising that these types of bandages have never been seen in a mummy before, he said.

In this case, Zink said, the bandages were spotted while the scientists carried out routine CT scans of mummies, as can be seen in the scans below and annotated with the full-lined arrow. The wound appeared to have been infected when she died, as the scans showed signs of “pus,” Zink said. These signs of infection are marked by the dotted arrows in the scans below.

“It’s very likely that they applied some specific herbs or ointment to treat the inflammation of this area,” which further analysis could identify, Zink said.

Zink said he wanted to get samples from the area to understand what caused the infection and how people at the time treated it.

But that could entail unwrapping the mummy, which Zink said he was reluctant to do. Another option would be to collect a sample using a biopsy needle, he said.

Mystery of the missing bandages unfurls

Zink says there was no clear explanation why, in this particular case, the bandages were left in place.

“The question is whether it was just left in place and it remained despite the embalming process or whether they placed it,” he said, referring to the embalmers.

Wound dressings typically did not survive the mummification process. But it’s possible the embalmers added the bandage on the body after the girl’s death.

Ancient Egyptians believed that the mummified body should be as perfect as possible for life after death, Zink said: “Maybe they tried somehow to continue the healing process for the afterlife.”

As to why other such examples of bandaging had not been spotted before, it is plausible that scientists had simply failed to spot them until now, or mistaken them for other mummy wrappings. Zink now hopes that more examples of mummy wrappings can be uncovered.

“There are always some surprises when we study mummies. I have now studied, I don’t know how many mummies in my scientific career, but there’s always something new,” he said.

Why is Nikola Tesla obsessed with Egyptian pyramids?

Nikola Tesla died somewhat unappreciated but his fame and the myth around him has continued to grow tremendously into our times. He is now perceived as the ultimate mad scientist, the one who essentially invented our times, credited with key ideas leading to smartphones, wi-fi, AC electrical supply system, and more.

Besides ideas that Tesla implemented and patented, he also had many other interests in different fields of research, some quite esoteric.

One of the most unusual was his preoccupation with Egyptian pyramids, one of humanity’s most mysterious and magnificent constructions.

Tesla believed they served a higher purpose and was investigating them throughout his life. What did he find so alluring about the pyramids? He wondered if they weren’t giant transmitters of energy – a thought that coincided with his investigation into how to send energy wirelessly.

In 1905, Tesla filed a patent in the U.S. titled “The art of transmitting electrical energy through the natural medium,” outlining designs for a series of generators around the world that would tap the ionosphere for energy collections.

He saw planet Earth itself, with its two poles, as a giant electrical generator of limitless energy. His triangle-shaped design became known as Tesla’s electromagnetic pyramid.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence,” said Tesla.

It wasn’t just the shape of the Egyptian pyramids but their location that created their power, according to Tesla. He built a tower facility known as the Tesla Experimental Station in Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe Tower or Tesla Tower on the East Coast that sought to take advantage of the Earth’s energy field.

The locations were chosen according to the laws of where the Pyramids of Giza were built, related to the relationship between the elliptical orbit of the planet and the equator. The design was intended for wireless transmission of energy.

Were the Great Pyramids essentially ancient Tesla Towers? How the Pyramids were made:

Another aspect of Tesla’s thinking is reportedly related to numerology.

Tesla was, by many accounts, an unusual individual, with obsessive qualities. One such obsession was the numbers “3,6,9”, which he believed were the key to the universe.

He would drive around buildings 3 times before going in or staying in hotels with numbers divisible by 3.

He made other choices in sets of 3. Some belief Tesla’s obsession with these numbers connected to his preference for pyramidal shapes and the belief that there was some fundamental mathematical law and ratios that are part of a universal math language. 

As we don’t know precisely how the pyramids were built and why they are looked at by some as creations that may be either generating energy or be serving as deliberately installed messengers or even code from an ancient civilization.

It’s easy to get into “ancient aliens” type of theories by extending such thinking. If you’re up for such an approach, check out this video: